The fictional worldview of the progressive left

Simple things amuse simple minds.

I recently watched a video in which an insightful Romanian fellow outlined the mental processes driving the progressive worldview. It made a lot of sense and reflected what I could see for myself.

The leftists think the world is simple. They cannot comprehend reality with all its complexity, so it is reshaped into something more palatable. Much of it is derived from fiction, especially Hollywood movies.

Here is a summary of this naive view.

The world is good by default. Its natural state is calm, peaceful and friendly.

This peace is threatened by unnatural evil, a villain. A hero fights the villain to save the world.

Once the evil is defeated everything is improved. This is the basis for understanding events. This is how the world works.

The good versus evil mentality maps onto the victim-oppressor tropes we see everywhere.

There is no concept of factions battling it out. No understanding of what today’s power structures look like. There is even less understanding of what institutions of the past protected us from. Why did we have armies and empires? Was it all a lust for power, or was there a more pragmatic reason?

There is no real perception of warring groups vying for resources. No grey areas or confounding factors.

Like slaying a monster, destroying the master oppressor solves all problems. After that everyone lives happily ever after.

This is why reality seems to constantly surprise the progressive-left. It often intrudes to thwart their plans. So they rationalize it away as hate and more oppression.

We then witness a limited capacity to manage negative consequences. They believe everything good will remain once serious changes are made. Defeat the cisgender white patriarchy and the factories will still produce and the justice system continues to function. The focus is fighting evil not real-world planning or actual consequences.

If we destroy America and its “imperialism” the world will improve. There is no appreciation of antagonists or rivals like China or Iran who may have ambitions of their own. There is even less awareness imported allies valued for their hatred of the West may have their own incompatible goals. Evil is being fought, that is enough.

Once they finally kill Voldemordt or blow up the Death Star everything will be amazing.

The observation this never happens doesn’t deter them because like most of their ideas the drive is to fulfil a deeper need.

Why this happens

Ideas based on fiction remain nice and simple. They avoid the complexity of life. Everything is neat and tidy.

Real life is messy. It rarely has neat solutions. Everything is a trade-off. Nothing is perfect.

Black and white thinking by comparison is more satisfying. Simpler to manage. The mental models that emerge from simplistic framing are correspondingly clean and easier to comprehend than anything in the real world.

Naive victim-oppressor narratives provide a superb opportunity for dogooders to imagine themselves as saviours. This is known as the drama triangle where victim-oppressor tropes become victim-saviour-oppressor instead.

The progressives often insert themselves into situations that do not involve them. They feel superior because they are attempting to save some victim. It is a flattering conceit that attracts many.¹

This in turn provides an opportunity to condemn critics who intervene with their hate facts and annoying observations. When a policy or idea is challenged on its merits, many drama-triangle thinkers remain stuck in an emotional paralysis, focused on the victims of oppression. The bigger picture is lost.

Discussions about questionable policies become fights about racism, sexism or homophobia and not the effectiveness of the intervention itself.

This means critics can be dismissed as bigots. Argument can be avoided, further reinforcing the fantasy model as serious challenges are absent.

These tropes are attractive to the insecure as they offer low-cost wins. While they battle titanic forces you reveal your primitive understanding of complex issues through your hatred towards their designated victim group, providing an immediate sense of superiority.

Their Harry Potter gets to dismiss you as Voldemort, someone who ought not to exist at all. No amount of punishment can be too much for the evildoers.

All this is seen every day from the cardboard-sign people at their endless protests. Their actions have no bearing on anything. It is all a little movie playing inside their heads, like schizophrenics let out for a day trip.

Magical thinking

Reality seems to surprise many progressives. Their schemes rarely work as they are too simple to accommodate the complexities of real life.

The celebrated example is socialism. No matter how often it fails, it remains popular because it sounds great to people who love ideas. They cannot relinquish the appeal of it.

More accurately, it describes a perfect society progressives imagine they themselves will run. That is just one giveaway that simple models are not about modelling real life. Advocates of communism never imagine they will be the ones picking fruit or cleaning toilets.

This kind of mind cannot easily manage reality because fantasy feels so much better. Anything inconvenient is ignored, a great way to keep the vision alive, but it means feedback is rejected.

The complexity they reject condemns them to an artificially simple world that does not reflect reality. That is why many of the actions driven by progressive-left thought are so destructive and fail to accomplish their goals.

Climate policy in European nations destroys reliable energy sources. These don’t save the planet, they kill old people in winter. They make food and medicine expensive. A handful become richer while impoverishing the masses.

That one example is too complex for the progressive-left mind. The focus is being a planetary saviour. All else is secondary. That is why there are so few debates. They think critics are monsters.

It is ultimately magical thinking. They are fighting a war inside their heads while we live outside in grubby reality astonished they cannot see real life unfolding.

Mental models rule. Inner frameworks imposed on the world distorting all that they see.

There is no easy solution except to remember we are grappling with a fairy-tale unicorn rainbow world like a movie constantly playing in their minds. That means treating them a little like psychiatric patients with obvious delusions, as insulting as it sounds.

Such is the worldview of the progressive left. They love their mental models because they bring comfort, and much of the comfort derives from avoiding complexity. Simple things amuse simple minds.

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1. The drama triangle is seen everywhere in progressive behaviour. If you have ever wondered about those otherwise nice liberal women who inexplicably want lots of “refugees” who are dangerous to them, it is the drama triangle at work.

These women see themselves as saviours. They see the adult men they are protecting as victims. This patronising view is very selective. It is not applied to East Asians, for instance, only people of the global south because liberal women generally don’t see themselves as superior to East Asian men.

We talk of suicidal empathy. But these are narcissistic performances not genuine displays of empathy. The women do not empathize with the men, they view them as helpless, like infants. At its core it is a belittling process designed to make the women feel good about themselves, not help real people. By necessity the women latch on to groups they assume cannot help themselves.

The next time you see some young liberal woman welcoming illegal immigrants into your country remember they don’t have compassion for the men. They have a need to feel good about themselves and will risk much to get it, like heroin addicts resorting to burglary. The consequences are ignored in pursuit of short-term gain. Taken to extremes they are risking their lives.